Lydie Breeze

by John Guare

An extensive reworking of two earlier (1981) plays by John Guare about a nineteenth-century commune in Nantucket, Lydie Breeze is a two-play, six-hour cycle about four seekers who come to the island to create a special model for a better world in the ashes of the Civil War and end up as a model for the corruption of twentieth-century idealism. The result is an almost surreal saga of American life, with allegorical meditations on the contradictions and interconnectedness of all things and the chaotic nature of the universe.

Genres: Plays

115 pages, Paperback

First published October 28, 1982

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

A surreal and caustic play about a land and people poisoned by their founders and past. An allegory of America?

[Stuart · Rating 3 out of 5]

This pair of plays aren't Guare's best, though the first act of PART ONE comes pretty damn close and the second act is enjoyable enough that if BULFINCH'S MYTHOLOGY had stood alone, I would have given it 4.5 stars. Things start to fall apart in part two, however, with THE SACREDNESS OF THE NEXT TASK, a play that stylistically goes in a completely different direction, much to the detriment of the over-all story, and makes the worse mistake of failing to focus on the characters from part one who made it so compelling. Additionally, the writing and plotting becomes clunky to the point of becoming unbelievable. It's not a bad play, by any means, but after the promise of part one, it's a bit of a disappointment, and makes one long for the better work of Guare's 80's and 90's hayday.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set me up to think it was something else with its first act; this is a messy overstuffed beast that lurches through the decades showing mistakes of the past revisited on the generations of the future. It’s bleak (at least on the page) and strays a little too far into convenient metaphor for my taste in the second act. I guess I wanted more of the slow-mo build up of their idealism and then a portrait of it falling apart instead of an already crippled idealism in act one that just immediately goes to rot.

But it’s bold and daring in its staunch conviction of the poison at the root of American idealism and a small small potential for redemption.